NATIONALITY

At the heart of this book's examination of the past in nineteenth-century Scotland is the concept of nationality. In its early twenty-first-century definition, nationality tends to signify ‘the status of being a citizen or subject of a particular state’. Nationality is a box ticked on a form, an entry on a birth certificate. One hundred and fifty years ago, however, the significance of nationality ran much deeper. Across nineteenth-century Europe, nationality signified both the collective character of the nation and the right of a nation to address itself as such. It was a potent combination of shared characteristics, identity, institutions and patriotism, more than merely what made the Scots Scottish, the French French, or the Germans German. Nationality was not only what made a nation a nation, it was also what made a nation great – at least in its own eyes. Nationality signified a set of shared national characteristics and an inherited sense of identity, yet it was also a virtue in and of itself, both for the individual and for the nation as a whole. This involved a form of Catch-22: without an expressed sense of nationality there could be no nation, yet there could be no nationality without a nation to embody it. The challenge was, how to prove one's nationality? How to assert one's right to nationhood?

One solution was to appeal to the past. In the much-cited words of Ernest Renan from 1882, the nation is ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’ constituted of the past and the present: ‘To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have accomplished great things together, to wish to do so again, that is the essential condition for being a nation.’ The vibrancy of nationality was proved by appealing to this sense of common purpose, inherited from the past, articulated in the present, and projected into the future. In order to exist, nationality had to be on some level collective, yet it also required identifiable roots.

Along similar lines to Renan, John Stuart Mill defined nationality in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) as a ‘portion of mankind … united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others’.